


Gunpowder & Earl Grey

by SiderealMessenger



Category: James Bond (Craig movies)
Genre: Canon Divergence, M/M, Movie: Skyfall (2012), villain duo
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-21
Updated: 2015-08-21
Packaged: 2018-04-16 08:53:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,271
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4619226
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SiderealMessenger/pseuds/SiderealMessenger
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After Istanbul, James Bond realises how his story will inevitably end. After Skyfall, all of his tenuous ties to MI6 are gone, but he lost his chance to simply walk away when he chose resurrection over death. However, he isn't sure that simply walking away is what he wants to do. </p><p>The new Quartermaster wants MI6 in flames, but he didn't anticipate that his recruitment into the agency - what should have been the perfect opportunity to set fires - would entrap him instead. Though he knows how to cover his tracks, everything he does is monitored. There is, however, one double-oh who is infuriatingly good at operating under the radar.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Gunpowder & Earl Grey

**Author's Note:**

> This is sort of just the beginning of a story that I wrote for a playlist I made (here: http://8tracks.com/tempest27/gunpowder-earl-grey). It's complete enough on its own, but I probably won't continue it further, though someone else is welcome to if you feel inspired.

_Orbis non sufficit. -- "The world is not enough."  
_ _\- Bond family motto_

 

They had all forgotten he was still listening. He hadn't taken out his earpiece, broken it, or switched it off. While he wrestled with Patrice on the roof of the train as it raced out onto that bridge, he was still listening. 

_"I may have a shot. It's not clean. Repeat, I do not have a clean shot. There's a tunnel ahead. I'm gonna lose them."_

An elbow to the other man's throat.

_"Can you get into a better position?"_

A fist to his gut.

_"Negative. There's no time."_

A knee to his lower spine.

_"Take the shot."_

Bond faltered, and received a sharp kick to the side of his knee, then a punch to his side.

_"I said take the shot."_

_"I can't! I may hit Bond."_

Recovering from another punch to the jaw, Bond twisted the man's wrist, ignoring the little cracks from inside, ignoring the scream.

_"Take the bloody shot!"_

The impact hit him like another train, and suddenly he was falling through open air, plummeting like that first angel who had let his pride get the better of him. As he fell, the last thing he heard before he lost consciousness was simply,  _"Agent down."_

~

Of course, it was only a matter of time before he came back. He always came back from a mission, no matter what he had been put through, no matter what condition he was in, mentally or physically. It was routine at this point, instinct. He was well-trained, as was every good hunting dog of the Crown. But this time, he had seen the future – or heard it, anyway. His sacrifice summed up in two monosyllabic words: agent down. And that was it, the extent of the acknowledgement he got from the agency and country he had supposedly laid down his life for. Oh, he had read M's obituary of him, delivered in a closed room of twenty people, and sent around afterwards in an email. It sounded cut-and-paste. It had to. No specifics, no names, not even his own. Just 007, fallen agent. "An exemplar of British fortitude" indeed. 

His new Quartermaster was a joke, insult added to decades of injury. He could feel his finely-tuned bloodlust that they had so carefully engrained in him unsettling, turning, seeking a different target than whatever was placed in front of him. It was like the black hood being lifted from a bird of prey, or an MI6 prisoner. He was beginning to see things differently now, more completely. He could look behind him and see his own strings being pulled. And what slender, tenuous things they were. 

~

Q (he didn't mind thinking of himself as the letter they had given him – on the contrary, he'd always relished anonymity) had been very aware of the visual metaphor in the painting in front of him. The old warship being hauled out unceremoniously for scrap. He had chosen this meeting place carefully. He'd read the file on this peculiar agent, rising from his own ashes like a phoenix, and was pleased to find that the man still had fire in his ice-blue eyes. Q could forgive the insults and derision. First impressions didn't matter much to him – what mattered was how things played out in the long run, and he was always playing the endgame. 

"I'll hazard I can do more damage on my laptop sitting in my pyjamas before my first cup of Earl Grey than you can do in a year in the field," Q replied to 007's comment about his age. In fact, he knew from experience that he could. That was what had caught MI6's attention. Q could understand their logic. Why have a powerful enemy when you could have a powerful friend? Their mistake was in assuming that Q had any desire to be friends.  

"Oh, so why do you need me?" 007 responded. 

It was a good question. Q could do a lot on his own, but... "Every now and then a trigger has to be pulled."

"Or not pulled. It's hard to know which, in your pyjamas." 

Oh, Q liked this man already. He handed over the agent's papers, and then the case. "Walther PPK/S 9mm short," he said when 007 opened it. "There's a micro-dermal sensor in the grip. It's been coded to your palm print so only you can fire it. Less of a random killing machine, more of a personal statement." Hardware wasn't his specialty, but even he thought he'd done something rather special with the modifications. It was an attractive weapon with discretion and class. Much like the man who would be wielding it, he thought.

There was chaos on the horizon, Q could see it coming earlier than most. And chaos provided many opportunities. Perhaps this ice-fire agent would be one of them. 

~

James Bond didn't blame the agent who'd shot him for her actions, just as no one ever held him accountable for his own actions in the field. They were both just doing their job, performing a service to the Crown, their patriotic duty. Anyone who got in the way was collateral damage. Still, when she held his straight razor to his throat in Macau, all of that didn't stop him from vividly imagining switching their positions, and taking blood for blood. After all, what was the death of another dog?

It was then that he realised he wanted to hurt the ones who had made him what he was – who had killed him and then somehow rebuilt him as something more, but with fewer pieces than he had started with. That was why his death hadn't been worth mourning like a proper human being's, because he wasn't a proper human being anymore. His own death, or the death of the agent in front of him, wouldn't even be a blow to MI6. One dog was nothing when the pack survived. 

Besides, he was too much of a gentleman slit the throat of a lady on her knees. 

~

Q thought perhaps he could be an actor in another life. He had certainly played through the scene well. The atmosphere was hectic and desperate, and if it had been Q's own system he would never have dreamed of plugging in an unknown laptop without screening it first, but M needed results, and she needed them yesterday. As he thought, Q raised no suspicion when he forewent the usual security checks on the foreign device. In a way, he was just as eager as M to see what Silva had in store for MI6 next. 

Of course, Q quickly gleaned the mechanics and purpose of Silva's code. He saw the obvious pitfall, and given a little more time, he was confident he could have found a backdoor to get around Silva's trap and crack the code wide open without consequence. But he had always underplayed his considerable skill, even before he and MI6 had set their sights on each other, and his ego could take this hit, as long as Silva made it worth his while. Q was making it more so, but he only hoped someone else would see the obvious soon, as well. 

He was rambling some nonsense about Rubik's cubes when Bond said, "Stop. Go in on that."

Q nearly smiled. Perhaps the man already had an instinct for sabotage, whether it was subconscious or no. "Granborough" was the bait key, and Q didn't even have to suggest it himself. When all of the doors opened, he tried not to savour the sound too much. It wasn't total system-wide failure, or a massive data leak, but Silva had proven he could do quite a bit of damage himself, and so Q far from begrudged him his escape. 

Q proceeded to work up a convincing panic over the matter, and later, no one said a word about his slip up. Silva had outsmarted everyone else. It only made sense that he had outsmarted Q, too. 

When Bond and M were on the run mere hours later, Bond even asked Q to lead Silva to them. Q thought it just might be Christmas. 

~

Bond couldn't say exactly why he brought M to Skyfall. He had his reasons, but they tended towards two camps. The first, the reasons he told M, that it was defensible, far from civilians, familiar ground, were all true. He could, potentially, protect her there and eliminate Silva without any more casualties. The reasons in the other camp, however, were just as true. Skyfall was isolated, off-the-grid, and familiar ground only to him. On top of that, exactly one person knew they were there, and Bond had the strangest feeling that the new Quartermaster might just conveniently forget that Bond had ever made contact with him, depending on the day's outcome. Bond had chosen Skyfall because here, he could make a decision. 

M was the closest thing he'd had to a mother since the memory of his own had long faded. This old mansion reminded him of that now more than ever. No one in their right mind would describe M as nurturing, but she had made him into a survivor. She had also, however, made him into 007, and she had ordered the shot. The shot that had hurt as if his own mother had fired it. His decision was whether he really did want to protect her, or whether he wanted to bring down the head of the pack.

In the end, he had tried to save her, but perhaps not to the extent he could have. One of Silva's men had pulled the trigger, but Bond's ambivalence might have been her downfall. He was only moderately surprised to find that, after the fact, he had remained largely ambivalent. He shed a tear or two, but when they dried, there was nothing left of his tattered loyalty to MI6. 

~

M was dead, long live M. Bond went through the motions of mourning and a new allegiance with the other agents. He made no grand declarations, nor did he simply walk away. He was in a good position to wait. For what, exactly? Call it...inspiration. 

He was on his way to another rendezvous with Q before his next mission, still going through the motions. This time the location was the Natural History Museum, and when he found the bench in front of the wolf display, he smiled. Q really did seem to be saying something with these meeting places, and Bond thought he understood the message. 

Q sat down beside him while he was admiring the impressive, snarling teeth of the wolf he took to be the alpha of the taxidermied pack. 

"You've picked a charming meeting location, as always," Bond said by way of greeting. 

"Have I?" Q said innocently. "I just enjoy getting out of my awful office."

Bond raised an eyebrow. "You have one of the nicest offices in the building."

"Yes, but with all that glass it's a virtual panopticon," Q sighed. "There's no privacy to speak of. I could almost get the impression that they feel a need to keep an eye on me." 

Bond eyed the man beside him carefully. "Is there a reason they should?"

Q chuckled quietly. "Of course not. I'm a patriot, 007." Bond flinched just slightly, involuntarily, at his codename, and he was certain Q picked up on it, because the man smiled just a little more in response. "Which isn't to say that I didn't dabble in the darker side of things when I was younger, but they got to me before I really began to appreciate the fit of the black hat."

"Shame," Bond said lightly. "I bet you'd look good in black."

Q flashed him a sidelong look that was both dangerous and alluring. "I read in your file that they got to you young as well. They like that, don't they? Because they think it breeds loyalty, like in dogs."

"Still," Bond said, turning his gaze back to the display, "I think a couple of wolves could take down a pack of dogs. If they were clever about it."

Q smiled as he reached into his bag. "I have a new gun for you, Bond." He took out a metal case and opened it to reveal a gun just like the last one, and instead of a radio transmitter, there was an earpiece beside it. "It's the same model with the same modifications," he explained, "but this one, unlike every other gun you've ever been issued, does not come installed with a tracking chip. As for the earpiece, it's securely wired to mine, and mine alone. In case you should need to go off the grid again like you did at Skyfall," Q said, again in pure innocence. "Since you're so infuriatingly good at flying under MI6's radar, I thought we might make an informal arrangement of it, for assignments that are...even more covert than the agency's usual standards."

Bond took the case and slipped it under his arm, standing. "I know a lovely little French bistrot in Soho with a private room in the back," he said. "Perhaps we should meet there next."

"I'm sure I can arrange it," Q said. 

"Then it's a date," Bond said with the hint of a smile, before turning to walk away. 

"By the way," Q said, stopping him after his first step, "I'm not sure I ever said it before, but I look forward to working with you."

Bond's smile turned to a smirk. "Likewise," he said, and left Q with the wolves.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed my writing, you can commission a story from me here: http://urban-sorcerer.tumblr.com/commissions


End file.
